he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
Show & Tell
d e v o n
will byers stan first human second
almost home
Xuebing Du
#extradirty
Sweet Seals For You, Always
Today's Document
roma★
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
Product Placement
JBB: An Artblog!
titsay
shark vs the universe
ojovivo
JVL
h
PR's Tumblrdome
@theartofmadeline
seen from Canada
seen from Bangladesh
seen from Chile
seen from Mexico
seen from United States
seen from Bangladesh
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Canada
seen from Russia
seen from Brazil
seen from Colombia
seen from Kosovo
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Chile
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
@deadmanjones
Lost Hat (A short comic)
This was the scene that inspired me to draw the comic. The idea has been in my head since June, after the release of the Good Omens episodes. It went lying in my folders for a while, but I’m glad to finally have it finished! Thank you for reading :)
That made me so happy-sad. Thank you!
Grim Prairie Tales (1990)
Originally broadcast on the 1st August, 1993 at 11:30pm.
Grim Prairie Tales was made on a shoestring budget in the Mojave Desert in 1990. The writer/director, Wayne Coe, was an illustrator who designed the American campaigns for Out of Africa, Brazil and Back to the Future before deciding that he wanted to get involved behind the lens. He gives us an excellent example of why writer/directors shouldn’t be allowed to talk about their aspirations or their films. To wit: ‘If I look back on my brief life at the age of 29, I’ve learned I don’t want to be a star, nor be the richest guy on the block. I want to have fun with the process of making films, and hopefully entertain and provoke people through them. If I get applause when the curtain falls, so much the better.’ Oh dear. But wait! Pay no attention to these saccharine burblings. Grim Prairie Tales is actually good… thanks mainly to the presence of good camerawork and some fine actors, especially Brad Dourif and James Earl Jones. Brad Dourif, as we have observed before, is a really strong actor who seems doomed to a career in weirdo cultist Moviedrome-type films. James Earl Jones, here looking like a refugee from The Big Silence, is of course one of the best living American actors. He usually gets cast as 'The Voice of God’. Here they play two drifters who meet on a lonely prairie and proceed to tell weird tales around the camp fire. It’s a portmanteau film, like Dead of Night, but in this instance the storytellers are so good that as Variety observed, you almost regret the interruption that their weird tales provide. Almost, but not quite. For these are good, weird stories too. It’s almost a new genre in fact - the Gothic western, rather like Richard Brautigan’s unsatisfying novel The Hawkline Monster or Cormac McCarthy’s epic tome Blood Meridian. Coe’s background as an illustrator serves him well when at one point Grim Prairie Tales turns from live action into a horror cartoon.
- Alex Cox’s original introduction, from the second Moviedrome Guide.
Brief thoughts…
This is very good, I thought. The best thing about it is definitely the unifying scenes rather than the stories themselves. The former with Jones and Dourif are very funny, but the stories themselves are not particularly scary which is its only real flaw. They’re good stories, though; the best one is is not a tale of the supernatural but of the horror of domestic bliss being punctured by the savagery of racism, bigotry and blind hatred. Cox mentions the camerawork and it is impressive. It was shot by Janusz Kamiński and was his first feature film as cinematographer. Three years later he shot Schindler’s List and has worked with Steven Spielberg ever since.
Year of the Pig on Flickr.
Year of the Pig
do you ever just
Bluedot 2018 on Flickr.
https://flic.kr/s/aHsmpv6WV8
Weeping Tree Angel on Flickr.
Weeping Tree Angel
Snow Jedi on Flickr.
Snow Jedi
So @JonathSchofield has begun tours of @MayfieldMCR; recommended as always. on Flickr.
So @JonathSchofield has begun tours of @MayfieldMCR; recommended as always.
It’s time to bring an end to the Rape Anthem Masquerading As Christmas Carol
Hi there! Former English nerd/teacher here. Also a big fan of jazz of the 30s and 40s.
So. Here’s the thing. Given a cursory glance and applying today’s worldview to the song, yes, you’re right, it absolutely *sounds* like a rape anthem.
BUT! Let’s look closer!
“Hey what’s in this drink” was a stock joke at the time, and the punchline was invariably that there’s actually pretty much nothing in the drink, not even a significant amount of alcohol.
See, this woman is staying late, unchaperoned, at a dude’s house. In the 1940’s, that’s the kind of thing Good Girls aren’t supposed to do — and she wants people to think she’s a good girl. The woman in the song says outright, multiple times, that what other people will think of her staying is what she’s really concerned about: “the neighbors might think,” “my maiden aunt’s mind is vicious,” “there’s bound to be talk tomorrow.” But she’s having a really good time, and she wants to stay, and so she is excusing her uncharacteristically bold behavior (either to the guy or to herself) by blaming it on the drink — unaware that the drink is actually really weak, maybe not even alcoholic at all. That’s the joke. That is the standard joke that’s going on when a woman in media from the early-to-mid 20th century says “hey, what’s in this drink?” It is not a joke about how she’s drunk and about to be raped. It’s a joke about how she’s perfectly sober and about to have awesome consensual sex and use the drink for plausible deniability because she’s living in a society where women aren’t supposed to have sexual agency.
Basically, the song only makes sense in the context of a society in which women are expected to reject men’s advances whether they actually want to or not, and therefore it’s normal and expected for a lady’s gentleman companion to pressure her despite her protests, because he knows she would have to say that whether or not she meant it, and if she really wants to stay she won’t be able to justify doing so unless he offers her an excuse other than “I’m staying because I want to.” (That’s the main theme of the man’s lines in the song, suggesting excuses she can use when people ask later why she spent the night at his house: it was so cold out, there were no cabs available, he simply insisted because he was concerned about my safety in such awful weather, it was perfectly innocent and definitely not about sex at all!) In this particular case, he’s pretty clearly right, because the woman has a voice, and she’s using it to give all the culturally-understood signals that she actually does want to stay but can’t say so. She states explicitly that she’s resisting because she’s supposed to, not because she wants to: “I ought to say no no no…” She states explicitly that she’s just putting up a token resistance so she’ll be able to claim later that she did what’s expected of a decent woman in this situation: “at least I’m gonna say that I tried.” And at the end of the song they’re singing together, in harmony, because they’re both on the same page and they have been all along.
So it’s not actually a song about rape - in fact it’s a song about a woman finding a way to exercise sexual agency in a patriarchal society designed to stop her from doing so. But it’s also, at the same time, one of the best illustrations of rape culture that pop culture has ever produced. It’s a song about a society where women aren’t allowed to say yes…which happens to mean it’s also a society where women don’t have a clear and unambiguous way to say no.
remember loves: context is everything. and personal opinion matters. If you still find this song to be a problem, that’s fine. But please don’t make it into something it’s not because it’s been stripped of cultural context.
This is actually really interesting. I’ve never known a lot of the background to this song.
I’ve always refused to hate this song because it never actually FELT creepy to me and I feel like people assuming there was like, a roofie reference in a 1940’s Christmas song is patently ridiculous so I’m glad to hear this confirmation of what I already felt.
Bringing this back again for another year
Reblogging again because, yes, I understand why people find the song so problematic but it’s also important to understand that the whole point of the song, the joke at the heart of it, is that the woman is in control, they’re both complicit in what’s going down and it’s the people who think they’re doing something wrong that are being laughed.
Whoop! Brilliant, beautiful and funny stuff from @bevismusson. Next time “Name a Hawaiian Queen” comes up in a pub quiz, I’ll be all over it with Lili'Uokalani.
Fantasy Island, Ingoldmells on Flickr.
Fantasy Island, Ingoldmells
Fantasy Island, Ingoldmells on Flickr.
Fantasy Island, Ingoldmells
Fantasy Island, Ingoldmells on Flickr.
Fantasy Island, Ingoldmells
Daniel Kitson's Something Other than Everything @rxtheatre
I feel I need to undersell this so as not to frighten you off, or make you presume I'm hitting willfully unsubstantiatable hyperbole right from the get go, so here's an understated statement: this was the greatest two hours of my life and it has changed how I think and how I feel, and less importantly I laughed a lot. Constantly in fact. Daniel Kitson reaffirms and repudiates your every thought and feeling at one and the same time. I am exhausted, entertained, and changed.
A Grasshopper between the Knees on Flickr.
A Grasshopper between the Knees
